SPLASHDOWN! Orion lands safely in the Pacific Ocean
So one presumes it will be doing the same thing in the Sea of Tranquility?
The Orion spaceship has landed safely in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of California, just a mile and a half off-target, after its maiden voyage in space. NASA’s new manned mission capsule operated almost entirely by the book today, passing each of its test flight milestones more or less on time, and dropping back to Earth …
Unfortunately, NASA probably had to come up some scenario and sold it to the politicians about how this will help us win the cold war ... opps wrong century ... to help us defeat the all bad guys around the world. If it's not in the name of national insecurity, then it won't get funded.
But I agree, better to spend it on this than on a drone that looks like a butterfly and carries a tactical nuclear weapon.
I'd rather them blow tax money on Orion
I hate to tell you but no-one is even asking you about whether you like to see this or that done with the taxdollars that your kids will have to pay back.
Yeah, "Orion" is nice (for some values of nice), but so would be Petunias on every balcon of Washington, D.C.
Full disclosure: I would vote for it (or at least something in the general direction of it), if I could and the money was on the table.
It's too bad that NASA probably has had to axe a lot of promising research and development in order to fund this stuff. Given the current speed of development, I doubt the SLS is going to be anywhere near competitive in price by the time it has been developed. Orion is going to be a pricey proposition as well.
Nasa needs a larger budget and for politicians to stop fucking up its agenda every 4 years.
I am very curious about the Roscosmos offer to launch an Apollo 8 style circumlunar tour on Soyuz.
Not heard of lately but it was real.
There are many obscenely wealthy people who had the ability to pay, a few paid many millions of US dollars to be on the ISS, why did none of the obscenely rich take up the circumlunar offering from Roskosmos? AFAIK, is no longer on offer, why is that?
It is interesting on many levels.
"Math needs a little work. 2014-1969=45 years."
Reading skills need a little work..
"And if that goes well, the space agency is aiming to get people going on a mission to Mars in 2021, over 50 years after it managed to make human footprints on the Moon."
2021-1969=52 years.
"There is nothing wrong with Russia.", I like to agree, but there is a guy who has driven himself into a corner, and I hope the Russians will understand how to deal with it before soon. There might be even stronger stupidity available. It would be better if internal stupidity could be dealt with internally before it becomes global.
Hovewer there is also this rather funny moon conspiracy theory. Do you really think the Russians would have kept mum if the USA had failed. Damn it.
Something for the weekend.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIviufQ4APo
"He is also very popular", so was Hitler, among the royal family too. Remember Henry Ford. At the Olympics in Berlin the French gave him the Heil Hitler, some countries did not. Please, no matter how I disliked Boy Bush he did accept his eight years, eight too many. Putin is now informing the Russians he will stay on (as the nice guy he is) for his fourth stint, only not for life as he has put it now. Hitler was elected in a democratic way. Shit happens and Woodhouse was joking about it. Smile Russians smile as long as you can, or the hell.
is a small capsule like that to go to Mars and back? The main point seems to be continuing handouts to contractors like Lockheed-Martin.
Not that they are short of taxpayer dollars.
The implication in their press is that they paid for it themselves (370 million US dollars, ridiculous, and that seems to be the cost of this one flight!).
How much were they receiving in the development phase?
Anyone with precise knowledge, please share it.
I do not believe it, US citizens paid for that flight and for the overpriced project, from a corporation that is obese from war contracts.
Do not believe that they do anything for the greater good, although I know their engineers try for excellence.
Congratulations to them for the flight.
Alright, I read it in detail. Some interesting ideas, seems very reliant on tech. copied from the USSR and Russia via the ISS.
Today's most interesting aerospace news is that Russia is going to pull the plug on ISS participation in 2020, and will use the modules that are currently in production for it as the basis for a new station in a higher orbit.
I only checked the Reg. tonight because I thought they might have a story about it.
I am sure that the fliers all get along most of the time, but with the economic war on the ground, it's no wonder that they want to put a limit on US exploitation of their space tech.
What a shame.
"...a pass through the lower Van Allen belt, atmospheric re-entry at 20,000 miles an hour and 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit"
Uhmm. Didn't El Reg pledge some time ago to using metric units (at least in addition to Imperial and Reg-al ones)? Mainlanders would appreciate.
Well let's see:-
Miles to kilometers is 8/5, so 3604 divided by 5 is about 700 plus a bit, multiplied by 8 is 5600 plus a bit, say 5700 km.
0°C to 100°C is the same as 32°F to 212°F so a lot of Farenheits is about 100/180 as many Centigrades, so 5/9 times as many Centigrades, so 4000 °F is about (5 x 4000) / 9 = 2222 °C ish.
Oh look I've got a caloculator, 5800 km and 2204°C.
Say 5,800 ish km and 2,204 ish Celsius being more like it.
Did you, by chance, have a hand the orbital and re-entry calcs which resulted in landing "just a mile and a half off target"? Now multiply that by the trajectory distance to Mars and "Oh hello deep space. Where did that little red planet go?"
Now all sing along "Ground control to Major Tom......."
I was only joking about the mile and a half. When it comes to travelling to Mars you start from orbit. You can calculate your trajectory very accurately when you don't have air in the way.
Once you're moving, you can also verify just how close you are going to be and tweak your trajectory en route. Is not like firing a gun at a target millions of miles away.
Still not a bad song, hey!
As for the units, I would say 'much hotter than a kettle that's come to the boil, and from a height of about 60,000 soccer pitches'.
It is still just an over-priced tax extravaganza for now. No big impressive show. Nobody aboard, they likely can't even do that if they want at this stage.
Don't get me wrong, a mile and a half out is pretty good. But Buran landed within 5 feet of its target on its one and only flight.
Also, keen to see how they plan to put together a Mars lander. That thing has to touch down with a hell of a lot of delta-v in the tanks.
Anyway. Well done to all. A safe flight is a successful flight.
But Buran landed within 5 feet of its target on its one and only flight.
Apples and bananas. Buran was flown onto a runway; Orion came down on parachutes. A little harder to calculate wind vectors and make adjustments. And let's not talk about copping hangar designs from the Russians, shall we?
Er, El Reg?
NASA sending people to Mars in the 2020's? Check your facts, please. NASA has ZERO plans to send people to Mars in the 2020's nor have they even begun work on the habitat module they'll need.
Seriously, 4 people in an Orion capsule for six months? Eww...
Kudo's to NASA for getting the mission to work but it doesn't change the fact that Orion is a horribly expensive capsule for a horribly expensive rocket, SLS and together, they're so very very (I'd even say horribly) expensive that NASA will never be able to afford to do anything with them.
Which makes all of this a bit pointless really...
I got an idea. They should make a reusable space ship, one that glides back to Earth. It could be turned around in about a month and reused. 'Cause that'll be cheaper and safer. I bet that the risk of failure might be about 1-in-10,000. And there's no way that each launch would end up costing $1.2B. With a fleet of four or five, they could be launched once a week.
" 'Cause that'll be cheaper and safer. I bet that the risk of failure might be about 1-in-10,000. And there's no way that each launch would end up costing $1.2B. "
You forgot the rest.
"And set a fixed cap of 1 Beeeelion dollars a year* on the budget (with no rolling over any underspend) and no allowance for inflation."
Thank you Caspar Weinberger of the (Nixon era) OMB.
*Enough to design a single new vehicle and a single new engine, which killed all the original 2 stage proposals. The winning design (1 vehicle + mother-of-all-RATO packs + humongous drop tank was a British aerospace engineer).
I'm an old fart who clearly remembers the birth of the space race way back in 1957. The single event that changed our world forever occurred when Russia successfully launched Sputnik 1, the world's very first satellite into orbit. America was completely caught off guard and thus the space race was born. The name Sputnik immediately went viral overnight. Soon, unmanned, then manned, orbital missions followed, again led by Russia. The space race was moving forward at breakneck speeds. JFK's throwing down the gauntlet speech in 1962 proclaiming that America would put a man on the moon in that decade, and did, was a fantastic period of amazing technological achievements by brilliant scientists and engineers and designers using archaic 'slip sticks' (slide rules) and drafting tables. Not only were there no personal computers in those days, there were no electronic handheld calculators. In spite of these challenges NASA did indeed put a man on the moon by 1969. OK, back to the future...
FFS, now I almost feel like Sherman, and we've slipped into Mr. Peabody's WABAC time machine and crash landed back in the early 1960s again. So in this, the 21st century, with ever more powerful super computers and advanced technology we're back to using 1960ish space capsules perched on top of incredibly expensive disposable rockets AND having to fish the soggy space capsules out of the salty brine again. WTF?! It's almost 2015 and we're suddenly back to square 1 again. I just can't believe how absurd this whole mess is.
I always felt like NASA lost the plot decades ago when it promptly abandoned human space exploration way back in 1972 after the (mostly) successful Apollo moon missions and instead concentrated on Earth-orbiting missions resulting in the long running Space Shuttle program. Sure much was learned, but at the cost of not advancing human space exploration.
So now we have the ridiculous Orion program. What an effing joke! We have had the technology to go to Mars decades ago - post Apollo. This can only mean that NASA seems to be employing the same quality of brainless twits, aka, 'scientists', that have infested the medical research 'industry'... you know... the ones who haven't found a cure for anything in the last 50 years. But...hey... they have mastered the art of treating, not curing illnesses, so you and I pay and pay and pay and... OOPS, that's a rant for another day.
OK, here are some interesting tidbits about Orion:
1. From Wikipedia: "Astronauts were deliberately left off the flight to test the heat shield, parachutes, jettisoning components, and on-board computers before committing a crew. As a result, instead of standard seats, cockpit displays, and life-support equipment, the craft was filled with sentimental toys and memorabilia..." OMG, how can anyone respond to this line of thinking? So they didn't think it was important to test the life-support equipment in actual flight conditions. This is effing beyond insane... unless they're not really planning on launching any manned missions!
2. From Wikipedia: "Astronauts may fly on the Orion by 2021." OUCH, so there won't be a manned mission until 2021 at the earliest?! The destination hasn't even been decided yet. [rolls eyes]
3. Here's the biggy... From qz.com:
"The US government has a spacecraft again—but don’t believe the Mars hype"
"The problem is that Orion is neither fish nor fowl: It was originally conceived as part of a program to replace the Space Shuttle as a transportation to low-earth orbit, but that program was cancelled for cost-overruns and replaced with commercial contracts. Orion was revamped as a vehicle for exploration beyond low-earth orbit, but it actually isn’t big enough to allow people to make the three-year trip to Mars—that will require an additional craft, the as-yet-undesigned habitation module. Then there’s the issue of building a lander to get everything down to the surface of the red planet."
"This spacecraft has cost $60 billion to develop so far and likely won’t fly again until 2018."
"And even if Orion is the spacecraft that will take people to Mars, that won’t happen for 20 years. Why then use technology that is decades old, and rockets that are even older?"
"That’s why [former NASA deputy administrator Lori] Garver have been critical of this project, which she says is more about placating contractors and members of Congress than accomplishing scientific goals."
OK, the bottom line for all you younger guys and gals out there who think this Orion program is so wonderful, we older folks, who were around to witness the absolutely extraordinary space programs of the 1960s-1970s, just shake our heads as we know it for what it really is... a gazillion dollar pork barrel project, courtesy of American taxpayers.
[quadruple facepalm]
"Rebuttal: Apollo 4, 5, and 6. Three unmanned flights that included the CM."
LOL...You're completely missing the point JP. NASA has already been there - done that - and has the teeshirt to prove it. Waaay back in the 1960s NASA was just spreading its wings and each new mission was unique and previously never done before.That's certainly not the case here in the 21st century. Yes, Orion space program is indeed regressive and is simply a sham. It was born from previous ultra-wasteful pork barrel projects that were cancelled. It just has a new name, that's all.
I was thinking something similar yesterday while watching it. I want to be excited about the new program, and it is great we are back in space, but I kept thinking Congrats NASA - welcome to the 1960's. They were even saying many of the systems were from Apollo. While proven systems are good, I don't feel like we have made the next evolution in travel like in the introduction of the shuttle program. The news had referred to the capsule sending them up to another ship in orbit though. Which could be more interesting I suppose. Then you could think of these as shuttle buses. Based on how the space station assembly took years to build, they should be building the new space assembly platform about now in time to be starting to assemble another ship by the 2020's though. Then those programs go through what the ISS went though in congress.
In terms of actual rocket science, they're keeping the actual good bits of the space shuttle, the SRBs and the space shuttle main engines.
As they don't need to fly any single-orbit missions anymore, they don't need huge wings anymore. The buge wjngs of the shuttle were needed so that on a single orbit polar mission, the shuttle could use its wings to compensate for the earth rotating underneath it, so it could return in a single orbit to its launch site. The air force wanted that, but no missions were actually flown.
Without wings, they can place the orbiter ontop of the rocket, and not have piece of foam and ice smash into it on take off.
The first SRBs to fly will actually be reused from the shuttle, and have flown before. They don't plan to reuse them anymore. If it doesn't pay off, don't do it.
The space shuttle main engines are phenomenal still today, their fuel efficiency is 1.7 times better than that of Saturn V.
Of course, politicians will probably cancel the SLS, which is the most useful bit of all the associated projects...
From reading, I always had the impression that NASA was ordered to stop the extra-terrestrial flights with crews at Apollo 17 ... a looong time ago.
Shuttle was an interesting failure.
US govt should refit the X-37b for piloted flights with two or three aboard, instead of whatever war-games they have it playing now. That would make for a very affordable and re-usable lift to orbit.
What use is a re-entry heatshield in the thin atmosphere of mars, let alone the wisp around the moon.
It should make a nice crater so we can find the landing site though.
Similarly, parachutes on Mars are so useless we use rockets to land, Good luck with them on a lunar landing.
So, how do these technologies help us get to either objective?